The development of software applications is an important activity of most modern technology companies, particularly those that are involved with e-commerce. However, while much attention has been given to software development suites that allow for the development of the underlying software application logic, less attention has been given to creating development suites that can be used to generate a complete software application user interface. This is particularly relevant in the portal application arena (including for example web portals, Internet portals, enterprise portals, etc.), since a portal is designed to provide a wide variety of applications in a graphically rich yet consistent environment.
Common complaints about traditional development suite offerings include that the widely-used Java Server Page (JSP) programming language is by itself too difficult for software developers to use in developing portal applications. These users (i.e., software developers and the companies who use these development suites) report that they spend too much time, money, and expertise building web applications. They would like to be able to have developers who are not Java experts to be able to productively build web pages.
Another common complaint is that “Net” style applications are changing the world: including the rise of instant messaging (IM), web services, and pervasive computing, etc. The twin innovations of heterogeneous client devices (including, for example, browsers on PCs; and other types of client software such as Java 2 Micro Edition (J2ME)), and service-oriented architectures, create both an opportunity and a threat to today's current application server vendors in that the prototypical applications that people build are changing fundamentally. If those vendors don't respond to these demands then they will be exposed to other vendors who are more agile. Current technologies, such as Microsoft's .NET framework contain an application development environment for building dynamic web pages using Application Server Pages (ASP), and market research indicates a development suite IDE offering is incomplete without a User Interface (UI) component. However, to date none of the Java-based application server providers have developed a system that caters to this category of developers and provides them with an easy yet powerful means for creating web and portal applications.